I’ve been doing quite a few presentations on Twitter lately, and in each one I admit I’m still on the fence about the whole thing. At it’s best, I find it to be a very useful source for finding information I would otherwise have never located. But at the same time, I’m frustrated by the deluge of information. While tools like TweetDeck have helped, they’ve only taken me so far. And more and more I hear from people that want to want to use Twitter, but just can’t find a way to make it as useful as they think it could be.
So I sat down to start specing out exactly what would make it better for me – and two simple things seemed to bubble up to the top, and both are very simple. I’d like each Twitter account to be able to designate (say) 5 topics that they tend to tweet about, and then each message they send they click which ones they are relevent to. And I’d like the option, on an account by account basis, to determine whether I’ll only receive tweets with links in them.
The key word in the first one is categories – just like the ones that are enabled in many blogs. What I don’t want is a constantly evolving set of tags – I don’t want to be having to go back and check every “following” tag cloud to determine which new terms I might be interested in. I’d like each person to have about 5 (example: general, social media, investing, sports, humor would be the ones I might use). I pick which of those I want to hear about from them, and only get the messages they designate for that category when they tweet. While I’m sure many people might just click all the categories to start (maximize reach), that’s valuable information to me – I’ll probably just not follow them.
This, of course, only works with scale – everyone needs to do it. And one of the likely outcomes would be total tweet volumes would decline dramatically – which, again, I would like. I really believe that many, many more people would find using Twitter more useful if this approach was being taken. I’ve tried various things around filter large groups by key words, etc. but can’t get any of them to do exactly what I want (i.e. not every post about “social media” has the words “social media” in it).
The second one is easier – in the vast majority of cases, I’m only interested in the tweets that link to another page (blog, etc.) with more information. I really don’t want the rest – except for @sportsguy33, @shitmydadsays, and a few other accounts like that. So again, on a case-by-case basis I want to select whether I’ll see tweets that don’t have links in them.
Of course, the initial set-up for this would take a serious time investment on my part. But I really think it would be worth it. Unless someone can give me a better way to filter through the deluge of information flooding my way…
